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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What period did our own definition of literature begin to emerge, according to Eagleton?
(a) Victorian period.
(b) Romantic period.
(c) Enlightenment period.
(d) Modernist period.

2. How do linguists describe the effect of language where "the texture, rhythm and resonance of words are in excess of their abstractable meaning."
(a) "A disproportion between one signifier for every other signified."
(b) "A disproportion between two signifieds."
(c) "A disproportion between signifiers and signifieds."
(d) "A disproportion between two signifiers."

3. What is the name of the pioneering essay the Russian formalist wrote that is the "beginnings of the transformation which has taken over literary theory in this century"?
(a) Literature as Image.
(b) Film as Thought.
(c) Art as Device.
(d) Theory as Practise.

4. What kind of analysis is phenomenology, according to Eagleton?
(a) Critical and discursive.
(b) Uncritical and discursive.
(c) Uncritical and non-evaluative.
(d) Discursive and non-evaluative.

5. What person is NOT included in the ranks of Russian formalists?
(a) Boris Tomashevsky.
(b) Viktor Shklovsky.
(c) Heinrich Wolffin.
(d) Roman Jakobson.

6. According to Eagleton, why is Hans-Georg Gadamer not concerned about bringing our cultural preconceptions to a literary work?
(a) Because like the literary work, they come from tradition.
(b) Because unlike the literary work, they come from modernity.
(c) Because unlike the literary work, the come from tradition.
(d) Because like the literary work, they come from modernity.

7. According to Eagleton, the subject in phenomenology was the source of all what?
(a) Oppression.
(b) Meaning.
(c) Life.
(d) Violence.

8. According to Eagleton, Stanley Fish's model excludes the possibility that there is a ______ of interpretations?
(a) Dominance.
(b) Rejection.
(c) Acceptance.
(d) Struggle.

9. According to Eagleton, "in the terminology of reception theory, the reader _________ the literary work, which is in itself no more than a chain of organized black marks on a page."
(a) Concretizes.
(b) Terrorizes.
(c) Sanitizes.
(d) Rationalizes.

10. What example from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries does Eagleton provide that was not considered purely factual?
(a) Sermons.
(b) Novels.
(c) Decrees.
(d) News.

11. Eagleton argues that reading literature in a new critical way was a recipe for what?
(a) Political consciousness.
(b) Political ambition.
(c) Political progress.
(d) Political inertia.

12. What proposes a "severe problem" for Husserl's theory?
(a) Language.
(b) Truth.
(c) Individuality.
(d) Consciousness.

13. For the economist Eagleton discusses, "those economists who dislike theory or claimed to get along better without it" were what?
(a) In the grip of an older theory.
(b) Didn't understand the importance of theory.
(c) In the grip of the most current theory.
(d) Had no knowledge of any theory.

14. What is the name of the economist Eagleton discusses in his preface?
(a) I. Fischer.
(b) J. M. Keynes.
(c) Adam Smith.
(d) Gordon Tuck.

15. According to Eagleton, eighteenth-century literature embodied more than social values, it also was an instrument for what?
(a) Entrenchment and dissemination.
(b) Education and oppression.
(c) Violence and abdication.
(d) Religion and redemption.

Short Answer Questions

1. During the Romantic period, how is literature more than "idle escapism"?

2. What is the name of the Russian formalist who published the pioneering essay that is the "beginnings of the transformation which has taken over literary theory in this century"?

3. How many decades, according to Eagleton, has there been a "striking proliferation of literary theory" since the publication of the Russian formalist's pioneering essay?

4. According to Eagleton, what kind of age do we live in, where "meaning, like everything else, is expected to be instantly consumable"?

5. For Eagleton, opposition between "historical" and "artistic" truth does NOT apply to what?

(see the answer keys)

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